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This police sketch of the suspect was released soon after the 1990 murder of Becky O'Connell.

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In the days after Becky O’Connell’s murder in May 1990, as law enforcement fanned out across southeastern South Dakota looking for her killer, Sioux Falls Police detective Mike Larsen had a decision to make.

The scribbled speculation of hundreds of callers was stacked in notes on his desk. Some had nothing to do with the case; they were simply someone’s oddball way of getting back at someone else who had wronged them. Many of the tips were like the one he held in his hands on a weekend morning four days after the little girl’s death — too vague, too generic.

That particular lead on that Saturday was telling him about a woman and her friends who had been talking the night before. They remembered a story about a man who had assaulted a woman with a knife sometime in the recent past in Sioux Falls. The woman didn’t remember the names of either the assailant or the victim. It happened near a Sunshine grocery store, though she couldn’t remember which one. It just sounded like the kind of person who could kidnap, rape and murder a little girl, she said.

“I’m looking at this and thinking it’s pretty generic,” Larsen, now 61, recalled recently. “I remember wondering, ‘What am I going to do with this?’ I almost considered tossing it and going on to something else.”

That he did just the opposite, those most intimately involved in the case say today, is a big reason why the state Tuesday night will execute Donald Moeller for Becky O’Connell’s murder.

“But for Mike Larsen following up on that lead, I’m not sure that Moeller would ever have been caught,” said Scott Abdallah, the former Lincoln County state’s attorney who successfully prosecuted the case. “It’s a testament to the incredible job law enforcement had done. How many would have followed up on an oblivious lead like that?”

Something in the note seemed oddly familiar to him, Larsen recalled, so he walked to the file room to thumb through recent assault cases. There among the many reports was one that had happened in the 500 to 600 block of South Second Avenue — near a Sunshine store, he thought.

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As he read further, it occurred to the detective that he had been to this crime scene to collect evidence a day or so after the incident. A man had held a knife to a woman and told her to take off her clothes or he would cut her or possibly harm her baby daughter sleeping nearby. In anger, she grabbed for the knife, was cut and fled terrified from the apartment.

That assailant was Moeller. According to the report, he lived on North Main Avenue — just blocks from the neighborhood where Becky O’Connell had been kidnapped.

“You get a gut feeling,” Larsen recalled. “I see this report of where he lives, and I’m thinking, ‘This is probably the strongest suspect we have so far.’ So I went up to the address where he was living.”

Larsen found two of Moeller’s brothers at the house on North Main, but the man he wanted wasn’t there. “Have him call me,” the detective told the brothers. An hour later, as he was out doing other follow-up, Larsen got a message from his detective bureau. Moeller was on his way in to see him.

As they sat down to talk, Larsen insisted to Moeller that he wasn’t arresting him. He just wanted to know where he was May 8. At home, Moeller replied. He got hungry about 5 o’clock, drove up Main Avenue to North Drive and past the very intersection from which O’Connell would go missing, then continued up North Cliff to a convenience store to buy chicken.

Instead of going back the same way, Moeller insisted he had driven west on Benson Road to Minnesota Avenue, then south to Brookings or McClellan street and back home. At some point, a buddy came by, and they drank beer all night, Moeller said.

As it turned out, that “buddy” showed up at the police station while Larsen was interviewing Moeller, perhaps tipped off by the brothers. “He said he was there to see Don,” Larsen said. “I knew if Don got in with this guy, he’d tell him not to tell me anything, and I’d be shot out of the water. So I told them to keep this guy in the waiting room, and then we went out another way.”

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Moeller surprisingly agrees to blood sample

In an amazing stroke of fortune, the detective had asked Moeller whether he would give them a blood sample — something they had been asking of everybody they interviewed, Larsen told him. Moeller agreed. They drove to Avera McKennan, where Moeller gave fingernail clippings and hair samples as well as his blood.

Moeller must have started to worry, Larsen said, because his cooperative demeanor changed at the hospital. As they were waiting to leave, “he started staring at me,” the detective recalled. “It reminded me of a Charlie Manson stare. I told the people with me, ‘You just wait; you’re going to see that stare again.’ ”

Truck, scene of slaying, was covered in mud

Afterward, Larsen said he would drive Moeller back to his truck. The detective knew it was similar to one witnesses had seen in the area north of Lake Alvin where the girl’s body was found. As they drove north on Dakota Avenue, Moeller pointed it out, parked on the street just east of the county administration building. The detective could see it was covered in mud. He also knew the area where O’Connell’s body had been found was a muddy mess from heavy rains the night of her death.

“When we got back, I put Moeller in the interview room and said I’d be right back,” Larsen said. “Then I told the detective who was with me to take his camera and get pictures of every nut and bolt on that pickup truck. He took me literally.”

With everything they had gathered, Larsen’s supervisors were convinced that Moeller was a strong suspect. So they obtained a search warrant in the coming days and went to his home. By then, Moeller had fled. Still, they found valuable evidence, including an Argus Leader under his bed, opened to an article talking about police taking blood samples from male members and acquaintances of Becky O’Connell’s family, as well as from possible suspects.

Moeller had returned his truck to the person he had been buying it from and skipped town, Larsen said. Nine months later, he was captured in Washington state. That came as no surprise to detectives, who knew Moeller’s last known location was a gas station in Mitchell, where he had written a bad check to buy gas, Larsen said.

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“We assume he was hitchhiking; we knew he’d gotten a ride with somebody with Washington plates. So we figured he was headed that direction,” he said.

Ultimately, the blood and hair samples Moeller gave to the detective, as well as the photos of his truck, led him to the execution chamber this week. Larsen, who retired from the police force 11 years ago and now works in security at the federal courthouse, will be there to watch him be put to death.

He’s not sure how he will react. As for his role in bringing Moeller to justice, Larsen said he suspects somebody probably would have taken a look at him at some point anyway.

“Who knows?” he said. “If we hadn’t called him in, maybe he would have stuck around. But maybe he would have never cooperated down the road. Maybe we wouldn’t have gotten the DNA evidence.”

Maybe. For Abdallah, the former prosecutor, there is no maybe as far as Larsen’s role.

“Mike is very unassuming and humble,” Abdallah said. “But the truth is, when this crime was committed, there were very few leads. There were a lot of dead ends. This wasn’t going anywhere. And then he did his job and followed up on a lead many might have ignored. That’s why we’re where we’re at today.”